When Brad and I went to Italy, the actual process of getting there was a long and strenuous journey that consisted of a trolley, two trains, and an eight hour plane ride. And that was just to get us to the airport in Rome; after we finally managed to leave there, we had a train, a subway, and a tram still ahead of us. It was certainly difficult, but one small event stuck in the middle of all that travel was what ended up really causing problems. That small event occurred in the Rome airport.
We de-boarded our plane in a timely and simple manner. We didn’t have any trouble clearing security (the Italian security/customs department is refreshingly, and scarily, lax). Though we waited a while for our bags, we eventually retrieved them without a hitch as well. No, all the places in airports where people normally experience problems gave us no issue whatsoever. It was when we were on our way to the train station and we stopped at the ATM that we became, for lack of a better term, “tripped up.”
I had been told, by Italy frequenters and bank tellers alike, that the cheapest and simplest option for obtaining foreign currency was to use the ATM as soon as you landed and to take out as large a sum of money as your withdrawal allowance would permit. ATMs gave the best exchange rate, and as long as you took out a lot of money at once, the international ATM fees would be worth it. We expected no problems with this method. Why would we?
I went first. I took out 150 Euros (about $212) without a problem. I received my card, my receipt, and my money (in that order), and stepped aside to let Brad take his turn. He opted to take out the same amount of money. After a minute, he received his card and his receipt. He waited.
“Um, where’s my money?” he asked uncertainly.
“Oh, mine came out last too,” I replied. “Just wait a second, it will come out.”
We waited more than a second. We waited more than a couple of seconds.
“Um.”
I’m not really sure how to describe the state of panic into which you are thrown when you’re given a receipt that states that you have just withdrawn a giant amount of money, but you actually haven’t. I’m also not sure how to convey the degree to which this state of panic becomes magnified when this occurs in a foreign country which you’ve inhabited for a total of approximately thirty minutes, and when you (like Brad) do not speak a word of the language that is native to said foreign country.
You’ll just have to take my word that what we were feeling at this moment was very, very unpleasant.
“I don’t… I don’t know what to…why did it…” We stuttered back and forth at each other for a second, at a total loss for words and ideas. Brad, as the one who didn’t speak Italian and had virtually no knowledge of how anything worked in this country, was waiting for me, as the one who had been studying both the language and the culture for the past nine years, to come up with an idea.
I, who had her money safely in hand, and who had also gotten no sleep on the plane, was totally blanking.
We stood in front of the ATM for a minute or two, reluctant to leave for fear that it should suddenly spit out Brad’s money and fall into the hands of someone who was, well, not Brad. But when the lady in line behind us started making angry noises, we surrendered and stepped aside, praying that maybe the machine was just out of money and that the next woman wouldn’t receive hers either, and then we’d have a somewhat believable complaint. But no: we watched miserably as she used the ATM without a problem and walked away with her money (and only her money; we were careful to count the bills in her hand) as though the world of someone near her was not falling apart.
The only thing I could think of was to talk to someone at the Information desk nearby. We shuffled over to it, weak from trying to suppress our panic and also from carrying two weeks’ worth of luggage around the airport, and had a brief conversation (in English) with the woman behind the desk, who told us to go talk to someone at the bank down at the end of the corridor. It sounded promising, so we trundled back down the hall with a small amount of hope-inspired gusto.
After a brief period of a completely pointless inability to open the door to the bank (“I think it says ‘push.’ No wait, maybe that means ‘pull.’ Just push. Okay, try to pull. Push again?”), we successfully gained entry and approached the kind-looking teller.
I paused, ready for my first opportunity to use my Italian in a real-life setting. I had been waiting for this moment for the past six months. I’d been having practice conversations with myself in my head when I was bored on the way home from work. I had learned the word for “Bug” so I could tell people the names of my cats, for God’s sake. I was prepared. I opened my mouth.
Nine years of study and a minor certificate in Italian, and all I could do was hold the receipt out feebly in my sweaty hand, point to it, and croak, “Ma… no soldi…” (“but… no money…”).
He looked at me for a second, trying to make sense of the situation: two sweaty, dirty, luggage-clad young foreigners come into his bank ten minutes after it opens, blurt a few words of broken Italian at him, and then put on a sad face to help convey the meaning of whatever it was they just said. But that bank teller- bless his poor, good-looking soul- managed to understand me. He whipped out a form, and, after asking me if he could proceed in Italian (I admit now that I probably should have asked him to switch to English, but I was too proud at the time), told me what to do. He checked a box on the form, asked me to fill out Brad’s information, made photocopies of the form, the receipt, and Brad’s bank card, and explained that the money would be deposited back into his account within the next day or two (I think).
It was that simple. We didn’t even have to convince him we weren’t lying. I’m pretty sure our sad faces and my violently shaking, panic-stricken hand as I filled out the paperwork were all the proof he needed. After thanking him profusely (at least “thank you” is a word I’ve heard and used enough times in class to be unable to forget), we left, satisfied, off to the next leg of our transportation nightmare.
The only lasting problem from this debacle was that the bank never refunded Brad’s money. I’m not sure if the teller told me that another step was necessary and I just didn’t understand him, or if the error was on the bank’s part. But we held on to all the necessary documents, and a week or two after we got back home, Brad called his own bank and they gave him his money without a problem, promising to investigate the situation.
I’m not sure why we didn’t just do that in the first place, but I think it has something to do with my pride (again), being in Italy at the time, and the name "Bank of America."
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